Intermission: Dream #2 support or fatigue of the creative process

Why does "he" do this?  It rattles me so.  It really does.  I end up tired and even exhausted from... a trip FROM the brain, trip from the brain. 

It seems like your brain can be your own worst enemy sometimes.  It insists on dawging you in your sleep with things that never happened that you only worry could have happened or which happened in a lesser version but are blown out of proportion by the brain.  I don't get it.  Why would your best friend want to hurt you so?

My dreams do not follow to the best of my knowledge any ideas about the purpose of dreams.  Sigmund Freud said dreams had to do with wish fulfillment.  I cant think of one dream that I have had in the past.... say, fifteen years that has been concerned with wish fulfillment, oh maybe except that one about climbing to the moon.  Otherwise they mostly have to do with scaring the wits out of me in one way or another whether it deals with someone being on the other side of that door trying to get in and they are not my friend or I am at the pool swimming except there is no water in the pool and I am swimming on the pool tile.  Its not something I ever really wanted to do or to happen to me.  But strangely it happens to me quite often in my dreams, or else the water turns to snow.

Nor can I fathom any latent meaning in any of these dreams that represent wish fulfillment.  Well, of course except for the obvious that I am dreaming of swimming which represents the fact that I really want to wake up and relieve myself at the toilet.  I am not a psychologist or even therapist, so I could not say this from intellectual study, but the only wish fulfillment I see is that I wish I would stop vivid dreaming.

And others say dreaming is a way of either memory consolidation or working through problems from the day.  Uh, for me, ... no.   If anything my dreams just add to and exaggerate my problems.  For instance at this time in my small business I owe a lot of people money.  But what does my brain do?  It makes me dream of owing TWICE as many people TWICE as much money.  So much that I have lost track of the list and I am trying to cross the people off the list of people I owe, but the list seems to grow with each cross out I make.  Maybe that was the same night I had my dream of climbing to the moon?  No, in fact it was just climbing to another tier of people I owed money to.  There were three levels of people I owed and I was climbing up and down.

And memory consolidation?  Why does the brain find it so important to store the memory of a picture of a poster I saw for a split second while walking to work of a clown in a circus?  I couldn't even remember what the poster was about, but for some reason my brain felt it so important that it had to incorporate that poster into my dreams and even make it a vital element of the dream.  That's called memory consolidation?  I call it waste of brain cells.  Sheesh, I might as well have drunk a beer and killed those brain cells if all they were going to do was store the image of a poster of a clown for absolutely no good reason.  And let me tell you, I never used any information from that poster or picture, but I still have the picture stored in my brain. Something like this picture, except in black and white.     

Frustrated after reading reams of studies on dreams and not finding one plausible explanation for my dreams and more so my ability to remember them in detail,  I therefore made up my own.  In fact my brain is pushing me to get to action and write and be creative.  I notice that sometimes my vivid dreaming becomes more intense during a fallow period of little or no writing.  So my brain is pushing me to get started again.

 "And oh by the way, here are some ideas  that you should WRITE ABOUT.  Get the hint dude?  Get creative, get writing.  You can write about swimming in a pool without water."

 "No no brain, you always give me that one."

"Well then  how about not having gone to a class all semester and the exam is tomorrow and you have no idea what the course is about.  Oh and the exam will be taken on the 19th floor of the building and there is no elevator so you have to walk up and in fact on the 19th floor lives... Satan Satan Satan.  Bahahahahahahah."

"Yeah brain, that is an interesting twist on the usual idea you send me about failing a class, but, you know what brain?  I think its better if I just write the story and you... you let me sleep please.  I have some ideas in my head for some stories which I think are a bit more... um... creative than yours, although don't get me wrong brain, I appreciate your sending me the pictures and ideas, but could you just let me work on them now and you let me sleep?  Let me get some peaceful sleep?  You haven't sent me a good idea since that dream about living right next to that electric power company which spewed out such soot that it shut the town down for hours during the day.  That was a good one, rather disturbing, as are most of your ideas, but I did use that one.  But since then.... nothing really good."

"No sirree Bob, I have to push you and send you more ideas and basically kick your arse or you just wont get to it.  So sorry, but more vivid dreams coming up for you.  You should write them down.  Why haven't you been writing them down again?"

"Oh bugger it."

Trip from the Brain, A-gain.   

My Father wrote very deep, intellectual books, the last one he wrote was about Hegel.  He used to take three hour walks along the Bruce Trail in Niagara Falls and St. Catherine's, Canada or the Mission Peninsula in Michigan to work on his ideas and consolidate and write and rewrite things in his head.  He was a very smart man.  Me, I just go to sleep.

 

     

 Above the first picture is the Mission Peninsula down the center between the bodies of water.  This lower picture is on the Mission Peninsula I am sure my Father saw it many times.